The phenomenon of radiation reaction describes the fact that accelerated charged particles emit radiation that carries away energy and momentum and, hence, the radiation emission must act back onto the motion of the particles. Those effects are expected to affect laser-plasma accelerators in the near future. This presentation explores novel signatures of radiation reaction via the angular...
Room-temperature metals and semi-metals, characterized by bound electron gases in near-continuum band structures, can be viewed as cold quantum plasmas. This perspective enables the adaptation of Particle-in-Cell (PIC) simulations, traditionally used for classical plasmas, to model dynamic phenomena in nanophotonics and plasmonics. In our work, we have extended the capabilities of the SMILEI...
During peaks of magnetospheric activity, energetic electrons trapped in the inner magnetosphere can precipitate in the lower ionosphere due to electromagnetic wave activity. Such waves can be generated naturally or artificially, for instance, through the emission of plasma beams. In this work, we study waves generated by electron beams emitted parallel to the magnetic field using SMILEI. We...
Fundamental magnetized plasma structures such as current sheets and flux tubes have textbook solutions for equilibrium, e.g., the Harris sheet and the Bennett pinch, which describe a balance between the magnetic and thermal forces in a plasma. However, in actual spacecraft measurements of these structures in space, various characteristics such as their magnetic profiles do not match the...
The “peeler” scheme, originally proposed for proton acceleration, involves irradiating the narrow (sub-micron) side of a solid tape target. A large number of electrons are extracted by the laser pulse and travel to the target rear, creating a strong space charge field. This accelerates and collimates hydrogen ions found in the contaminant layer, resulting in a proton beam with an energy...
Acceleration of electrons in vacuum directly by intense laser fields holds great promise for the generation of high-charge, ultrashort, relativistic electron bunches. While the energy gain is expected to be higher with tighter focusing, this does not account for the reduced acceleration range, which is limited by diffraction. Here, we present the results of an experimental investigation that...
The onset and development of electron-positron cascade in a standing wave formed by multiple colliding laser pulses requires tight focusing in order to achieve the maximum laser intensity. There, steep spatiotemporal gradients in the laser intensity expel seed particles from the high-intensity region and thus can prevent the onset of a cascade. We show that radially polarized laser pulses...
Optical smoothing is a technique used to smooth out the laser focal spot of kJ/nanosecond class laser beams in Inertial Confinement Fusion experiments. Instead of being a perfect Gaussian or near-Gaussian beam with a well defined temporal envelope, the laser light is the result of a complicated interference pattern constituted of many intense spots -called speckles- moving and or blinking...
Liquid leaf targets show promise as high repetition rate targets for laser-based ion acceleration using the Target Normal Sheath Acceleration (TNSA) mechanism and are currently under development. This work discusses the effects of different ion species and investigates how they can be leveraged as a laser-driven neutron source. Based on artificial neural networks, we developed a surrogate...
